FemmeSongs

I Remember California - R.E.M. (mp3)

Anna Begins - Counting Crows (mp3)

Almost every female in the history of my life has a theme song, even if they don’t know it. They usually don’t. These aren't the carefully-chosen songs to match a person's entire significance, but rather the instantaneous gut reaction that glues people to a specific and indelible moment, usually early in my memories with them.

My mother’s song, for example, is “Delta Dawn,” the Tanya Tucker version. If there’s lyrical significance to this connection, it’s happenstance and not intentional. I just think back to my earliest memories, and this is the song I think of.

We were sitting in a neighbor's living room, and I heard my mom sing along with Tanya on the radio, and I just knew I had to learn this song. I was four. 

I’ve never told my mother this, because I’m not sure what she’d think about it. Considering that I’ve often been a very intentional person when it comes to songs and lyrics, I’d have a tough time convincing her there wasn’t some secret motive or message behind it.

That’s true of most of the songs connected to most of the girls and women I have known. They would almost certainly read more into the connection than was intended.

With my first girlfriend of sorts, Amy, it was Rick Springfield’s “Affair of the Heart.” We had no affair, and we had young clueless hearts, but she gave me Living In Oz as an unexpected birthday present, and I never forgot it. I can even tell you the exact spot on the playground where I sat on a bench and unwrapped it, and the look on her face, of fear and trying not to care too much followed by that ecstasy of mere relief when I looked genuinely pleased.

Or take Daisy, the regular BOTG commentator I’ve known since high school.

Her song? “I Remember California” by R.E.M. I connect this specific album quite directly with Daisy, because I remember being with her at the record store -- was it Camelot Records? -- in the mall when I bought it. And I remember listening to it sitting on the floor in her bedroom.

I remember Daisy liking this song a lot, and I remember having no clue why. The song never did a damn thing for me. Which is precisely why I connect it with her. And the connection doesn’t go a centimeter deeper than that.

The way I remember it -- and I’m absolutely positive she’ll correct me if I get it wrong -- listening to this album was one of the first instances when I remember being in her room, and I remember being all excited and nervous that I had a female friend (whom, yeah, fine, I found attractive) who was willing to let me into her private life, her personal space.

People will do lots of wild and extreme things to be near people they’re attracted to, so listening to “I Remember California” a few dozen more times than I was inclined seemed a laughable toll for the opportunity.

The song I most immediately connect with my wife is “Anna Begins” by the Counting Crows.

“August & Everything After” was the first album we landed on when we started dating, a common ground between her background of Billy Joel and Elton John, and mine of... well, the rest.

In this rare case, the song was lyrically relevant and awkward and beautiful, and the words filled up the corners of my mind like a slow flood with each passing week. Indeed, when I met my wife, I had grown quite comfortable with the notion of being single and completely expected to remain that way until sometime far, far down the road. I’d tried the college relationship thing several times, had failed miserably for all of the trite reasons, and had accepted my fate with fading pity and increasing glee. While my friends were all smothering -- often uncomfortably -- under the weight of strange relationships, I was a non-slutty free agent, enjoying the occasional date, answerable to no one, and riding the wave of semi-popularity from my weekly newspaper column.

J insists on the whole love at first sight story. She knew I was the one the minute she met me. Yada yada.

I’m not saying the whole series of events wasn’t a weird thing. I’m not saying there wasn’t something extraordinary or at least suspicious and serendipitous about those initial encounters, how things worked out despite the obstacles that got in our way. And this song was part of that. Counting Crows had hit a different level of popularity by Spring Break, and we were on our third or fourth date shortly after that, and this became the cassette that played whenever we were in the car together.

And Adam Duritz kept insisting, through this song, that I was really going to regret it if I didn’t let this girl in. Other than Adam, I’ve only known one other white guy who could pull off dreadlocks. His name was Bozart. Bozart got pulled over driving our rented Winnebago in Key West because we were all passed out drunk. Bozart had a 15-minute conversation with the two police officers about how irresponsible and childish we were. It wasn’t the cops who kept the conversation going; Bozart just had to know how long he could pontificate with them without them ever getting suspicious about his state of mind. With dreads.

My point being, I respect the otherworldly wisdom of white men in dreads. I probably owe Adam a thank you card for my wife and my children. Maybe this post will suffice.

Only In America

Firewoman - The Cult (mp3)
I Think It's Gonna Happen - Army Navy (mp3)

The USA Women’s soccer team is the paragon of American team sport.

They exemplify more aspects of what makes our country so amazing than any other group. They are a walking, running, sports bra-clad icon of American pride.

The only possible competitor for this historical and symbolic spot would be the USA men’s basketball team, where a group of men, generally from lower-income levels of society, generally African-American, have united after they have achieved the American Sports Dream of striking it rich and famous. They attempt to place country before celebrity and, with clearly superior talent in a sport born in the USA, take the itty bitty world by storm.

But soccer is the world’s sport. We didn’t invent it, and our average sports fan doesn’t much care for it. The US men’s soccer team has never won the World Cup, and they won’t in the 21st Century, either. We are far from proving ourselves ready for the world stage as men.

But the women? They’ve taken the world’s game and reminded everyone what is unique about us: Even if we don’t respect women to the degree we should, and even if they aren’t yet given every chance to be equal, we try much harder and are much more committed to the idea than every other country in the world.

For all the flaws in Title 9 -- a law that naively or stubbornly insists on a fantasy world where just as many women as men want to play sports -- the US women’s soccer team is an example of what it did right and of why the law exists.

When they played Brazil on Sunday, the best player -- and probably the three of the four most-talented players -- all wore yellow. But what Brazil and all of South America gains in raw and devoted talent, they lack in financial and social support. South America simply doesn’t care about women being equal, and certainly not in sports. Same is true for big chunk of Europe.

Of course I’m using gross stereotypes here. Plenty of American men are pigs and chauvinists. But what’s truly beautiful about America is that, despite pigs and chauvanists, despite hundreds of thousands of Americans who think women’s sports aren’t worth a fraction of the effort or money they require, something about our ideals and values require that we support them.

Italy, Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, Croatia. All great men’s teams, but totally marginal on the women’s side. Am I supposed to believe this isn’t cultural, that there isn’t something about the cultures of these countries that simply don’t appreciate, value, prioritize or reward female athletes?

Guess which country won the last two Women's World Cups? Germany. They have a kickass female chancellor. Pardon me if I don't think this is mere happenstance. Yet, by comparison, our women's team says more about our country than Germany's does about theirs.

Don’t take my word for it; take their coach's. Pia Sundhage is a Swede, and they’re not exactly known for their oppressive misogyny, but even she feels something uniquely powerful about the Way of the USA:

“I come from Sweden, and this American attitude, pulling everything together and bringing the best out performance of each other, that's contagious. I'm very proud and very happy to be the coach of the U.S. team."

Or take 5-time FIFA Women’s Player of the Year, Marta, the most-talented crybaby this side of John McEnroe:

(Marta) pointed to her head, leading me to think she meant the Americans were strong in the air. "No, no," she explained. "It's the mentality." (from ESPN.com)

There’s this documentary called PELADA. Fascinating little flick. Young man and woman, floating uncertainly after their college soccer careers have ended, take some grant money and travel the world to experience pick-up soccer games in one country after another. They go through South America, Europe, Asia and even the Middle East and play game after game.... with men.

Best I can recall, they only play two pick-up games with women. One is on some salt flats, and the other is in Iran. Two female pick-up games out of, like, hundreds. And one of those is in I-friggin’-RAN!!

This isn’t my “you really oughtta give women’s soccer a shot” blog. Truth is, there ain’t nothing about women’s soccer that, if you haven’t found it in you to try it, and if you haven’t ever found soccer interesting, is gonna magically win your heart.

It doesn't matter whether you like it, or whether you watch it, because here’s what you can say about our women’s soccer team, and it’s something that proud Americans like saying:

ONLY IN AMERICA.

Those words mean more for this particular team than any other team for any other sport at this juncture in our collective American sports history.

The US women play France in the semifinals tomorrow (Wednesday). Kickoff is at noon EST on ESPN. BOTG's authors will be sitting at Tremont Tavern to cheer on the Red White & Blue, and we welcome others to join us! 

Dancing On The Floor

It’s a blue, bright blue, Saturday, hey hey.

Bob’s post yesterday about Danceworld led me to thoughts of Goldfrapp.

I’m an alien to this place called Danceworld. Modern dance and I are vinegar and water. Between opera and modern dance, I probably feel more ignorant and clueless in modern dance, because opera carries this sense of being from a different historical era, so it makes sense that I wouldn’t get it. Modern dance feels, well, modern. Which means we moderners -- especially those who appreciate art and creativity and dancing -- should have a better sense of it than we do.

Yet here I am, an illegal alien in Danceworld.

This thought led me to Goldfrapp’s video for A&E, easily one of my favorite songs of the past decade.

And the pain has started to slip away, hey hey.

The video seems to me a perfect example of what Bob talks of in Danceworld: What happens in the video has almost nothing to do with the subject matter of the song, yet somehow the underlying emotion and feeling of the song is very much being communicated. It’s one of the more haunting videos I’ve run across in a while.



I’m in a backless dress in a pastel ward that’s shining.

I’ve put this song on a lot of mixes in the past few years. In fact, it’s fair to say that if you’ve received a mix CD from me in the past two years, there’s a 95% chance this song has been on one. And this song has come up in conversations after the fact on several occasions, far more than most of the songs I’ve included. I can think of four people who have said something like, “That Goldfrapp song is really mesmerizing/beautiful/memorable.” And I will nod and enthusiastically agree.

And then I ruin it for them.

“You know what it’s about, right?” I ask.

I think I want you still, but it may be pills at work.

“The narrator is in the hospital after a botched suicide attempt,” I say.

“What? I'm not sure that's what it's about.”

“Oh yes. It definitely is. She’s either in the ER or the psych ward, but she’s definitely in the hospital. And it’s definitely because of an overdose.”

“I thought it was just a break-up song.”

“It IS. And it's a love song, too! That’s what makes it so freaky and haunting and beautiful!”

Do you really wanna know how I was dancing on the floor?
I was trying to phone you when I’m crawling out the door
I’m amazed at you, the things you say that you don’t do
Why don’t you ring?

Apparently, the song was inspired by an experience Allison Goldfrapp had in the A&E -- the UK’s version of the “ER” -- but I’m comfortable betting that she’s far closer emotionally to this song than a mere visit to the emergency room. This song feels, to me, like it could only be written a safe distance away from an intensely-connected past event, and she’s in a place where she can look back on her more intense and passionate and lost and foolish self and think, “You were royally screwed up, but my God you were beautiful.”

There might be a fine line here, but I don’t think she’s wishing she had succeeded in her suicide attempt. Rather, I think there’s something about that past version of herself she remembers and loves in spite of her near-fatal flaws. And what has to be the best line becomes the translation of post-overdose convulsions to "dancing on the floor."

And the pain has started to slip away, hey hey.

It’s a love song to her old self, a self better left in the past, but necessarily remembered. That I finished Jennifer Egan’s mesmerizing Letters from the Goon Squad, a novel that won roughly a bajillion awards including the Pulitzer Prize at the same time I'm rekindling my love for this song is perfect serendipity, because the song reminds me of Sasha, the main female character around whom the novel flows.

But that’s for another day. Back to the video.

No matter how beautiful I find this song, the video had to come from a different place. A concert video wouldn’t work, nor would some attempt to literally translate the song for the viewer, because it would freak people out in the wrong way entirely.

So you turn to some dreamy, psychadelic modern dance in the woods. Goldfrapp becomes some fairy tale character in white, surrounded by dancing leaves and trees who eventually break up their synchronized routine to go their own expressive invidual ways while she loses her mind. Then they return to settle her back down into her dreamy slumber. Then it all becomes some vision or dream of Goldfrapp’s other member, who’s out on his own camping.

But early on, when she stands in the center of four "leaf-dancers" in the shape of the cross and takes herself a nice little crucifictitious pose... wow.

A&E - Goldfrapp (mp3)

Totally freaky. Totally weird. Totally Goldfrapp. And a perfect match for a song few people seem to like more once they know what it’s about.

Defending M'Lady

99 Problems - Jay-Z (mp3)
My Baby Loves Malt Liquor - Roger Alan Wade (mp3)

Ashley Judd needs no man defending her for anything she does. In fact, I get the distinct impression that she would probably despise a fella who tried for being the annoying egotistical Knight on a White Horse. She would likely ride him and that horse right into a Giant Sequoya.

But history is replete with tales of women not needing rescue but stupid men swooping in and trying anyway, and I’m precisely that kind of stupid man, so here I go swooping...

CNN includes the following write-up and excerpts from her new memoir, All That Is Bitter and Sweet:

While speaking about an AIDS awareness program she works with, Judd writes, "Along with other performers, YouthAIDS was supported by rap and hip-hop artists like Snoop Dogg and P. Diddy to spread the message...um, who? Those names were a red flag.”

Judd continued, “As far as I'm concerned, most rap and hip-hop music - with its rape culture and insanely abusive lyrics and depictions of girls and women as 'ho's' - is the contemporary soundtrack of misogyny.”

She concludes, "I believe that the social construction of gender - the cultural beliefs and practices that divide the sexes and institutionalize and normalize the unequal treatment of girls and women, privilege the interests of boys and men, and, most nefariously, incessantly sexualize girls and women - is the root cause of poverty and suffering around the world."

Because Ashley is a white lady from Kentucky, and because she failed to note that several rap and R&B males are much more into pedophilic abusive relationships rather than merely smackin’ up adult bitches and ho’s, her comments apparently raised some sort of ruckus. She’s apparently racked with guilt over this ruckus and is apologizing for her part in it.

Because Ashley’s much more business-savvy than I, maybe it was the right thing to do. She also rightly acknowledged that plenty of unfair stereotypes are laid at the feet of bluegrass and country music. And we all know those stereotypes are foolish, because those musicians hardly drink alcohol, much less sleep around.

But not a single word of what she said is any more incendiary or unfair than the things Aaron McGruder, creator of BOONDOCKS, has been saying for almost a decade. It’s not all that different than what Bill Cosby says, either, except it’s hard to use Bill Cosby as an example since he has his own womanizing issues and could arguably dismissed as an Oreo in the first place.

Some stereotypes exist because they’re true far too often. Country stars sing about drinkin’, screwin’, and drivin’. R&B stars sing about drinkin’, screwin’, and dancin’. The difference? Country stars sing about getting drunk and sleeping around on their wives or husbands (or being the victim of such activity), while R&B stars sing to an audience for whom marriage is a dying concept, so instead of affairs, they just sing about screwing anything and everything that crosses their path.

Don’t expect me to apologize for acknowledging statistics, and I’m not going to apologize for linking to just one of more than a dozen columns and articles that say precisely what I did except perhaps with a little more decor.

The cynic is then forced to ask a tough question, a question no true Ashley Juddite wants to ask himself: Is her apology merely an attempt to drum up publicity for a controversy that hardly exists in the first place? Is she trying to apologize for something no one was really all that upset about in the hopes that it might sell a few more books?

She might be half-crazy, but she’s also much smarter than your average bear. The hundreds of people who added their own comments to the mix, however (scroll to the bottom of the CNN article), are not smarter than your average bear. They are a reminder why the Web 2.0 is often a depressing look at why we are the society we are.

The Tawny Breast

Postcards from Paradise - Flesh for Lulu (mp3)

It was not my intention to write about anything awkward or sexual for a while, but Whitesnake has a new album out.

No, seriously. Yeah, that Whitesnake. They really have a new album.

David Coverdale, the flaxen-haired lead singer who was already approaching AARP age when “Here I Go Again” became the earworm of choice in 1987, has somehow found three musicians to travel through small casinos and venues to keep the dream of rock immortality on an iron lung just a little bit longer. When his dream isn't on the iron lung, it appears Mr. Coverdale himself is.

Today the part of David Coverdale will be played by Katey Segal in lots of agey makeup!

Or... Whitesnake, featuring lead singer Angela Lansbury!

Here’s the link to the video. I couldn’t in good conscience embed it here, because it’s just not very good. Further, looking at Coverdale in motion rather than in a single still capture just makes me very, very, very sad. And a little bit nauseated.

Coverdale emerged into popular consciousness with Deep Purple, but he was a replacement in that band. Whitesnake was his baby from the get-go.

Like most musical acts in the ‘80s to elevate themselves into platinum stardom, Whitesnake would never have hit the radar without a seriously memorable video. It’s unlikely that anyone filming the video could have predicted the influence of an attractive unknown redhead dancing on the hoods of a few Jaguars. Sure, the song was catchy enough on its own, but something about that woman, and that dancing, and those cars, that combined for an incredibly popular video.

My friend Scott and I were in on a little secret. We knew why the video was so damned popular. We were two of the teenagers who watched the request show on MTV each night to see it. We both recorded it on tape. Several times. Even if we hadn’t been naturally inclined to like the song, we fell in love with it because of what it stood for in its essence: a beautiful, perfect, inadvertently-exposed breast.

Wanna know where I fell on the social ladder? Wanna know how awkward and clueless I was around women? Here’s all you need to know: Scott and I could tell you every last detail about that video. You could blindfold us, and we could still have paused the VCR on the exact moment when Tawny’s breast pops onto the windshield of that Jag. Camera slides in front of band. Coverdale humps the mic as it hangs upside down. Tawny glides belly down the front of the black Jag, and STOP! Boob Time!

(If you must witness this rare moment for yourself, a moment that in the world of Skins is almost yawningly laughable, feel free to go directly to 2:19.)



Younger readers will need to appreciate a crucial difference in teenage life circa 1987. Boobs were precious and rare. Each boob sighting was a gift from the boob gods. It was easier in 1987 for a dorky boy to sight a bald eagle than to see the bare breast of an attractive woman. There was no Internet, no land of unlimited and free porn, no such thing as Google image searches where even an innocent entry can result in a few dozen unwanted nipples.

Boobs back in 1987 were confined to convenience store magazine racks -- most of which remained behind the counter with that grouchy-looking fat lady smoking a KOOL. I was fortunate enough to have located my father’s three Playboys a year or so prior, so I’d had the immeasurable pleasure of getting intimately acquainted with Vanna White’s upper torso. Our coveted swimsuit magazines and the Victoria’s Secret catalogues we snatched from our mothers’ wastebaskets were considered high-test. The occasional sheer nightie or wet bikini, items that permitted a glance beyond mere fabric, became memorized or dog-eared pages. They were the teen testosterone equivalent of highlighted Bible verses. I was perfectly capable of recreating, in my mind’s eye, every last (sometimes, admittedly, airbrushed) detail of a model’s curves.

In certain things, knowledge and information can indeed be counterproductive. I mourn for the current teenage boy who has seen more sexual positions enacted in digital film by the time he’s 16 than my grandfather could have possibly dreamt up. My grandfather surely mourned for me, being exposed to an assault of model-perfect naked breasts and thong-backed bikinis, thus building up an unfair expectation of what an awesome and miraculous spectacle any nude female should be. It's almost impossible for anyone of my generation -- and definitely so for anyone younger than 30 -- to imagine a time when the only way to see a naked woman was to actually have a naked woman physically present in front of your very eyes.

This is the crap that goes through my head when I see the withered and frightening visage of David Coverdale circa 2011.

Tawny Kitaen was at the peak of her attractiveness in 1987. A life of sleeping with overaged rock stars would gradually deteriorate her appearance in ways that mere age cannot.

This video was the pinnacle of their relationship, the band, her looks, his talent. Yet David Coverdale will get no Crazy Heart movie made about his life. No comeback awaits him. He will merely continue to slip into the sad and too-long denouement of an existence that was, for a couple of years here and there, the stuff of envy.

And Tawny... I guess I owe her either a heartfelt thank-you or a sincere apology. Probably both.

Precocious Alone

So Alone - Juliana Hatfield (mp3)

To be a brilliant and fiercely determined female is an isolating condition.

Saw the Coen Brothers remake of True Grit over the holiday break. The musical score was amazing, as was the movie. But what haunted me as I walked out of the theater was the main character a girl who concludes the film as an “old maid.” (Apologies if this is a spoiler. It’s not much of one if it is.)

The girl, Mattie Ross, is the movie’s eyes and heart and provides the point of view for the ensuing action and drama as she joins a U.S. Marshall and Texas Ranger in pursuit of the man who supposedly killed her father. To say she is supernaturally sharp and well-educated is to understate the level of her mutant power. The girl has the equivalent knowledge of a second-year law student and a kind of understanding of the ways of the adult world that drives adults crazy. So many of us complain about how slowly kids age these days, how immature they can be, yet nothing seems to anger and agitate adults more than a kid who is sharper than his or her years. Mattie’s world in this movie is full of men -- she only encounters and converses with two women the whole movie -- and nothing throws men off their game more than a younger female who can best them with a higher intelligence and greater grasp of information.

Perhaps, at long last, the 21st Century is changing this. With an increasing majority of college graduates and advanced degree earners being women, and with men increasingly focusing their skills on manual matters of war and day labor, perhaps the day has come when men will have no choice but to accept that they are the dumber sex.

Two songs immediately come to mind when I think about Mattie and the women I identify with her: “Secret Garden” by Bruce Springsteen and “She’s Always a Woman” by Billy Joel. Some people see these songs as romantic or loving, and in a way they are. But both are also written with this strange mix of resignation, consternation, and aggravation from men who have one too many times been defeated or painfully flummoxed by a woman who in some ultimate way is beyond their comprehension. They can appreciate her, perhaps, but they will never totally “get” her.

I guess it’s easy for some married guy to look on the fates of women like Mattie and feel a tugging on his heart. I’m just a meaningless observer, a backseat driver, a rubbernecker. My sympathies and my cheering for them is ultimately as useless as Spike Lee on the sidelines of a Knicks game.

Did Mattie have to end up alone as an old maid? Perhaps it’s not fate, but it certainly seems inevitable. Maybe she marries. Maybe she even marries twice. But that woman will never find her match. For a woman to have so many amazing factors working in her favor yet seem incapable of finding the man able to manage, appreciate, tolerate, defer, whatever, will always give me this gnawing churning in my stomach. Or my heart. They’re located very close to one another, and I never took a biology class.

I can quickly think of 10 women -- seven friends or acquaintances or coworkers and three family members -- with similar dispositions, and their fate risks being equally unavoidable. From early on in my dealings with them, I can’t help but think, You’re going to have a helluva time finding a man capable of handling you.

Is this an insult? Is it a compliment? Is it both? I’m not sure. In my heart, it’s meant both as a compliment to the woman and an insult to the general state of 21st Century Man, but I suspect someone more attuned to the scholarly or political side of gender politics would happily point out the ways my comment is patronizing or insulting or downright spiteful. Then again, people involved in gender politics and studies tend to look for ways to read anything as patronizing, insulting and spiteful.

We are in an era when the sanctity - hell, the utility - of marriage is increasingly under scrutiny, where the number of women choosing to remain single well into their 30s and beyond is skyrocketing, where the number of men incapable of sitting still in a classroom long enough and convincingly enough to achieve “academic success” is fading faster than Marty McFly’s image in that newspaper clipping.

There’s that old fable about the scorpion and the frog*, and I can’t help but wonder if women like Mattie are scorpions. Sometimes beautiful, almost always intelligent, and usually driven by forces mere mortal men can’t comprehend or won’t appreciate. But scorpions nonetheless. And they don't wanna kiss the frog. They wanna kill it.

Or, put another way, which do we admire more, the fierce indie band that thrives on the fringes or the one who sells out to a big record company, polishes their sound, and aims for the arenas?

* -- used most recently and famously and -- for this post's purposes, ironically -- in a movie about a dude who looks like a lady, The Crying Game.

... Got No Reason

The following is a guest blog from regular visitor Daisy, our first female guest-blogger.

I have recently come to the realization that despite my unbiased upbringing I am a bigot. I do not judge based on one’s race or religious affiliation, but I have to admit I am prejudiced against short men.

I don’t mind short men living in my neighborhood and often find them entertaining at parties, but if I had a daughter I really wouldn’t want her to date one.

First let me give you my definition of a short man: any man that is not taller than I am.

Now, I am 5 “4 on a good day if I stand up straight so even if I’m wearing heels it doesn’t take much to be taller than I am. I realize that my disdain for the smaller statured male is irrational, unreasonable even, but I just can’t help it. There is something about a fellow who is less than 5’8 that just isn’t right.

I first became aware of my distaste for diminutive dudes my freshman year in college. I out with a young man who was just as nice as he good be. He was well mannered, intelligent and kind. Things were just peachy the first two dates and on the third date he had a little too much to drink and asked me to drive his car. I got in and began to adjust the seat and the mirrors and then to my horror realized that they needed no adjustment. I was so disturbed by the notion that my date and I were the same height that there was not a fourth date.

Years passed and I came up with a dozen different reasons for why that particular relationship was doomed; none having anything to do with my arbitrary small mindedness. It was at the least an isolated incident.

A new family moved in on my street and while I’ve know the wife for a little while now I just met the husband. I was almost speechless when I first met him because I was actually looking down at him (now I did have on my tall red shoes, but still!) I spent a good portion of the evening talking to this gentleman and was actually a good conversationalist and quite witty. Throughout the entire conversation I kept thinking inappropriate things like “how does his wife bare wearing flat shoes all the time?" and “what if their son is even shorter than his dad, how will he stand a chance in life?"

I feel horrible for having these thoughts, but I just can’t help it. There is just something wrong about a miniscule male. I am even starting to wonder if my dislike for Tom Cruise is really because of his Scientologist superiority or his subpar stature.

I fear it is too late for me. I am doomed to a life of bigotry. I only hope that my sons can grow up to be more open minded …and taller than 5”8!

MetaWomen and the Gawkers Who Love Them

Just - Radiohead (mp3)
The Fame - Lady GaGa (mp3)
(Links removed by request)

[Super-Special Double-Length Thanksgiving Edition!]

As the father of two girls who seem to be approaching their pre-teens at a speed approximating Warp 4, I spend a lot of free time obsessing over girl issues. As I scour various news sites for interesting stories, my eyes are always drawn to stories about women, or about the feminist movement, or about women in the focus of the pop culture lens.

• A July 30 article in The New York Times Magazine shares one mother's fascination and relief that her daughter has found Wonder Woman, the iconic female superhero, as opposed to Hannah Montana or Lindsay Lohan.
• An AP story talked about the rising concern parents with "The Princess Pedestal," our cultural fascination with convincing our daughters that they're all that and a bag o' chips.
• I get the weekly email from The Frisky.com just to sneak a peek into life on the other side, the concerns and subject matter of often horny (mostly 20something) women. Yes, I've hit the age where I'm more concerned about being in touch with my daughters when they are horny and 20something than I am about being in touch with current horny 20somethings.
  

Three women under the magnifying glass of our culture have particularly caught my eye lately, and I've linked to fascinating features on all three of them, as I ponder where a society increasingly operated by empowered women who can turn assumptions and stereotypes on their sides begin to rake in cash for doing so.

Nadya Suleman

The only contributions Nadya Suleman can make to pushing our civilization forward is as a cautionary tale. She's mentally unstable and, if not a bad mother, a completely irresponsible one. If Jon and Kate should never have made eight, then one of them alone sure as shit shouldn't have 14. And although I've never watched a minute of any of these shows, I'm almost certain that Jon and Kate are both more intelligent and at least a hair's breadth more responsible than Nadya.

Nadya Suleman has 14 children.

Please. Sit and stew on that for just a second. She is that NASCAR wreck that kills a famous driver. She is the online execution of a hostage. She stands for everything we know to be wrong about celebrity, about maternity, and about humanity all lumped into a single doe-eyed idiot, yet she and some hungry producers know full well that enough people will watch her to make a profit out of exploiting the children.

Nadya's not being exploited. Exploitation, in my mind, requires an unwillingness to participate. Her kids, for example, have no say. The world gets to witness their own odd little version of hell and giggle at the pseudo-real life that the camera creates for them. They are being exploited. And the only question left worth asking -- and strangely, it IS worth asking: is their exploitation and its financial reward better than the alternative? Even Nadya says it quite well: "People are like, 'Oh why don't you go to work?'... OK, think about the reality of the situation: I leave, I go to work, I'm away from them all day, I make -- how much? $15,000 a year? OK, I need that at least every two months So, how on earth is that going to work? That's absurd. You live in my life one day and you'll see, you'll realize: it's ludicrous."

Yes, it is, Nadya. It's ludicrous to suggest most of us could ever, ever, be living in your life.

Megan Fox

To be sure, if Megan Fox looked like Susan Boyle, she wouldn't be the focus of my interest. And while she is certainly stunning, I have to stress that Ms. Fox isn't The Hottest Woman Ever. Not by a good stretch. She's very attractive, and she oozes a kind of dangerous sultry vibe that kicks her looks up a notch.

What fascinates me is how focused she is on playing the game of being a celebrity and doing it in a very "this is just a game" way. While it's a little much to suggest Ms. Fox is "highly intelligent," she must be given tremendous credit for understanding her game. With only minimal TV and movie credits to her name, she quickly rose to become one of the most desirable magazine pin-up girls of the 21st Century, and she did it by creating a fictional version of herself that makes out with women and loves wild wanton sexual encounters. (In reality, she's been dating one guy for five years, which is practically four lifetimes for a Hollywood relationship.)

What the NYT Magazine article suggests, however, is that Ms. Fox has been too successful in her effort to sell her body and an image rather than hone her craft. She might have shot to the top so quickly that people discover, to her detriment, that "there's no 'THERE' there." So she and her handlers are working to make her more human, less sex doll. Sadly, I fear they'll discover that once our society has embraced you for your body, we don't really care to embrace your soul.

We've already got Meryl Streep for that.

Lady GaGa
If Megan Fox is attempting to manipulate the Hollywood world in order to find success by milking and manipulating stereotypes, then Lady GaGa is doing a similar job on our preconceived notions of music bimbos. Before the Slate article linked above, I'd never even heard a song of hers all the way through. But the article intrigued me, and I watched her video of "Paparazzi" as well as her performance on MTV. The claim that she is taking the career track of Britney or Christina and turning the lens back on the artificial and superficial marketing machine is impossible to deny.

She's glam, yet so over-the-top glam that it requires she be NOT glamorous. You cannot be completely wrapped up in yourself if you are so careful to never expose what you really look like, if you so clearly cartoonize yourself to make a point. (NOTE: One of the most popular Lady GaGa searches on Google: "Lady GaGa without makeup.")

While the profit motive comes first, that she's attempting to make a statement, a serious and heavy statement, even if I'm not certain I know what it is quite yet, the effort alone is worth at least a little admiration. Will I buy her albums or go to her concerts? Hell naw. But I'll admire her nonetheless.

Nadya is a moron with screwed-up values who caught lightning in a bottle in having eight babies at a time when our popular culture makes heroes out of morons. Megan is a hot crafty dame in a business that rewards hot crafty dames. She played her cards carefully and well and has been rewarded for it. Lady GaGa has done them both one better. She has taken a formula for pop fame -- flash, glitz, shock -- and turned into some kind of threeway between Madonna, Andy Warhol and Andy Kaufman.

All three, ultimately, are women who find tremendous profit in playing the game of fame. I hope the rise of the MetaWoman is a good thing. One day my daughters are going to look at these women -- or the next generation of them -- while Wonder Woman remains imprisoned in cheesy cartoons and undervalued comic book forms. Diana might have a magic lasso, but these women have the magic box. No Amazonian princess with all her skills and cunning can easily defeat such a power as that.

Billy will be taking Thursday off for turkey and giblets, but he wishes you and yours a gleeful holiday and looks forward to begging for more of your attention next week! He also figures the odds that this post survives the entire weekend are slim, because one of these people will have some lawyer who contacts my host or Blogger and yanks this thing down faster than the Hunchback of Notre Dame tugs those damn bells.

Sex: The Mississippi River of Gender Divides?

Sex as a Weapon - Pat Benatar (mp3)
Skin Trade - Bob Mould (mp3)
Mr. Roboto (live) - Dennis DeYoung (mp3)

Two stories recently caught my eye. That they caught my eye says plenty about me, but they also, when set next to one another, say quite a bit about men and women and that timeless beautiful word, SEX.

The first story I found at The Frisky. (It's like sneaking a peek at Cosmo except without the guilt or shame of other adults watching you do so while you're sitting in a Barnes & Noble or something. Thank God for the Internet!) Apparently a German company by the name of First Androids have created a life-sized and somewhat realistic sex doll android. At a cost of almost $4,000, the company claims to have received four MILLION backorders of this creation. Yes, four million men -- or maybe three million men and a million more bigamist wannabes who just can't stand the idea of screwing just one android sex doll for the rest of their lives -- believe it's totally worth a $4 grand to have the replica of a female at their eternal sexual beck and call, so long as they have enough D batteries (or should I say "Double D batteries"?).

The second story surrounds the new book, "Why Women Have Sex," written by a pair of researchers who identified 237 reasons why women have sex, with most of them having absolutely nothing to do with romance or physical gratification. TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SEVEN REASONS!!! The researcher even rattles off, just right off the top of her noggin, a huge list of great female motivators for having sex:

"...promotion, money, drugs, bartering, for revenge, to get back at a partner who has cheated on them. To make themselves feel good. To make their partners feel bad." Women, she says, "can use sex at every stage of the relationship, from luring a man into the relationship, to try and keep a man so he is fulfilled and doesn't stray. Duty. Using sex to get rid of him or to make him jealous."

Meanwhile, according to Dr. Moi, men pretty much have sex for one of about five reasons:

1. Because we like a woman, and this connection turns us on.
2. Because we think a woman is irresistibly hot, and this connection turns us on.
3. Because a woman makes us think we're hot or irresistible or adorable or (insert ego-boosting adjective here).
4. Because we're horny and needed a nut, and we hardly even care who assists us.
5. _________________ (This space left open just in case I've left some really compelling reason out... which is unlikely. I just figured I should give men five reasons because that's how many fingers they have on one hand... oh never mind.)

Don't worry, men and women aren't really THAT far apart. The Almighty Orgasm is the number one reason women have sex, and LOVE is a safe #2. The difference is that, for men, it pretty much starts and ends right there, but with women, there's this whole string of additional possible motives, littering the floor  like bullets from a scene in Black Hawk Down, that could motivate their sexual decisions from one minute to the next.

Another great quote:

"The degree to which economics plays out in sexual motivations," Buss says, "surprised me. Not just prostitution. Sex economics plays out even in regular relationships. Women have sex so that the guy would mow the lawn or take out the garbage. You exchange sex for dinner." He quotes some students from the University of Michigan. It is an affluent university, but 9% of students said they had "initiated an attempt to trade sex for some tangible benefit".

Women use sex for economic benefit; men buy $4,000 androids so they can get their rocks off without the burden of an (unspoken) economic transaction. They use fiscal economics to avoid the dangers of sexual economics, knowing how easily abused they can be in that world.

OK, it's not all men. OK, I don't think men actually want sex androids to avoid anything. OK, I think men are just really really really horny and don't even think about anything all that deep that involve both words "sex" and "transaction."

Is four million orders surprising because it's too many from that tunnel-visioned half of the gender divide... or not enough?

Are 237 reasons to have sex too many, or is five too few?


* -- For those of you under the age of 30, back in the '80s and farther in the past, you had to buy these printed things called "dirty magazines" to see boobies, and that's all most of the magazines showed, was pictures of boobies and sometimes other parts covered in patches of hair. Nowadays you can, with two clicks and Google, witness just about any sexual act the mind could invent in even its most demented states. But trust me, it used to require careful planning and cunning tact (huh huh).